A Grandparent’s
Brag Book goes to the office as a mini scrapbook mounted
on a desk frame. Flip a page each day to have a gallery
of photos, each on a cleverly themed page. Mini scrapbooks
are a great alternative to an annual letter sharing the
past year with family and friends. Pages would include high
points of your year: a birth, graduation, new job, new home,
and so on. A few minutes alone with your imagination, and
you will think of many more uses, many more ideas.
Mini scrapbooking is an economical, quick
way to gather a few memories for posterity. It seems digital
scrapbooking is getting a great deal of attention lately,
especially with the major scrapbook publications putting
out special issues devoted to digital arts.
A large majority of traditional scrapbookers
are having fun creating word art and journaling for their
traditional pages with computer software, which is really
a form of digital scrapbooking. Some just take it a level
further and create their entire pages on the computer. It’s
exciting when new tools are introduced to help artists with
their craft, but at the same time, and store photographs
on computer hard drives instead of photo albums and boxes.
Being able to use photos archived on your
computer is one of the main reasons digital scrapbooking
is increasing in popularity so rapidly. If you’re
a digital photographer and need to do any type of photo
editing tasks, you most likely already own one of the fabulous
image editing packages on the market, such as Adobe®
Photoshop® or Photoshop® Elements, Jasc Paint Shop
Pro®, Ulead PhotoImpact®, or Microsoft® Digital
Image Pro, just to name a few. They all have incredible
photo editing features, but did you know you can also create
entire scrapbook layouts from scratch using these tools?
In creating a digital layout from scratch, there are the
same basic steps: design background paper, add photos, create
photo mats or accent papers, add effects such as drop shadowing,
create embellishments (if desired), and finish with titles
and journaling. It’s up to you how you use those steps
to define your own unique style. Some like clean graphic
lines giving the look of a magazine ad, while others like
the look of traditional paper-pieced layouts, with “paper,”
embellishments, and the illusion of three-dimensions. The
beauty of digital is that either is possible with the same
photographs. Using the same digital photo, I will show you
multiple looks you can create showing the power of digital
imaging software. Ready-made templates, like our Simply
Digital™ product line, are also available for those
who like the look of traditional scrapbooking, but want
beautiful results in little time.
Scrapbooking
supplies
|